Dimitri Boylan
Welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation Podcast. Today we have Chris Lego, director of people technology at Virgin Media O2. Kris, thank you so much for joining us today for having me. Why don’t we start with Virgin Media O2 and clarify what’s going on there?
Kris Legroe
Okay. Yep. So Virgin Media O2 is the result of a large merger in the telecom industry. Virgin Media, on the one hand, mostly fixed broadband TV products and then O2, one of the biggest mobile networks in the country. We joined about three years ago. And obviously, the biggest focus in those first three years was around the customer experience and making sure that we’ve found all the right synergies for the customer and making sure that we also had that fixed-mobile conversion product offering for our customers.
I think we’re at a point now where we can start looking at our internal processes because, you know, with a big merger like that, you know, a lot of the processes are still very separate, right? There are a lot of different environments in the IT space. Some of the applications that we use were quite advanced within the people team within the human resources to move to one core HR platform.
We also implemented Avature as our single talent acquisition platform across all the company’s brands.
Dimitri Boylan
Thank you for that. But the journey, over the past couple of years, did you come from one side or the other side? Were you in?
Kris Legroe
I was hired after the merger.
Dimitri Boylan
You were hired after the merger.
Kris Legroe
I must say I have spent almost 12 years in the Liberty Global Group of Companies. Obviously, Liberty owned Virgin Media, so I have a bit more affinity with the culture than with the O2.
Dimitri Boylan
And is your background primarily in technology?
Kris Legroe
It is. Technology has always been a big interest of mine. It was sparked when I studied history. It sounds a bit strange, but we did use some technology in historical research. So it was mostly in technology, but also services, shared services. So I’ve helped implementing large shared services organizations in a company, I started at Cisco, for example.
Right. You have many years at Cisco, I think
Kris Legroe
15 years or 15 years at Cisco. Okay. And then, my third angle in my career is really rewards. So everything related to compensation and benefits, executive compensation, all the programs that you can think of.
Dimitri Boylan
Cisco, obviously a tech company, you deployed a lot of systems there. You’ve deployed a lot of systems in Liberty Media. You’re deploying systems again. Where are you on your digital transformation journey right now?
Kris Legroe
Yeah, I think we’re still in the beginning. Because of the complexity of the environment being the, you know, the result of the merger. Even though we have one core HR system, we have, we have, one single, talent acquisition system, everything downstream is still very separate.
Right. So the complexity of what we have to deal with, even though your, you know, your initial processes are streamlined and you try to create the same experience for your employees when it comes down to some of the downstream processes around, for example, how to get your laptop or how to get. Yeah, you know, your access to different applications can be very different, based on whether you’ve been hired on a Virgin Media contract versus you have been hired on a new two contract.
Even though the front door is Avature and our core HR system, we use Oracle, is similar. All the rest is still very separate. Now, I do think that you can still work on some of the basic processes and at the same time do something very advanced as well. I don’t think you have to get all the basics in order before you do some of the really cool, interesting stuff.
We’re still trying to figure it out, and I saw some interesting presentations today as well around our pre-boarding journey. But at the same time, you can also start testing and piloting skills in a learning use case for. Yeah, right. Using AI, using automated skills while mapping jobs to skills or employee to skills.
So we’re trying to find the right balance between fixing the basics and improving the experience there. At the same time, we’re using technology and everything it can do to help us move forward into becoming that skills-based organization.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. Well, I guess besides the fact that being skills-based is probably where the state of the art is going, a little bit of it is also just creating excitement about transformation, right? I mean, you want to get people engaged in the future and in the future of the company. Cleaning up all the issues that need to be cleaned up is just not something you can get people very excited about, right?
Kris Legroe
Absolutely. Yeah. Because typically that’s what we try. You know, you have the big bang, you implement a system and then you try to get into a continuous improvement mode. And every single improvement is too small to really communicate about it. But if you would compare the situation today being compared to three years ago, yeah, you made a big difference, big improvement. But because it’s continuous improvement, it’s hard to perceive. Exactly. People don’t really notice it. So you need some of this, you know, really positive projects around, you know, something that I think technology enables today, which we were not able to fix previously as an HR organization is helping employees with their career. Help me to figure out what my what a good next career step could be. And because we don’t we were not able to help them. Typically it’s only upwards. That’s how people perceive it. But by using skills you can really create some interest in areas of the business that people would not think about before.
But those are absolutely also very valuable for you as an organization. I would also think that it helps employees become more valuable in the labor market, but it does involve pursuing those types of opportunities.
Dimitri Boylan
It also fits into the younger generations model of of success. Their model is very benchmarked on how engaged I am with and how much I’m learning, and less on how many people I’m managing or whether I have a corner office or not. So I think the new generation needs that kind of lateral mobility. And of course, skills make it easier to sort of to, to make that happen inside the organization. Right? Because otherwise you are trapped with, well you are in this path and this next step up. And if you don’t make it, you stay here. Well, maybe forever, because you haven’t made it to the next step.
I think we’ve discovered that customers with internal mobility, especially if they can tie that to performance and learning, can find that magic way of reducing turnover. It is challenging, though, because it requires a very close relationship between tech and H.R. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
You know, you’re coming from the technical side, you’re working with your HR practitioners. What’s that experience like?
Kris Legroe
I think it’s it’s getting a little better. I think, HR professionals see the value of technology. Sure. I think the biggest challenge is finding a balance between, you know, best-of-breed versus everything in one platform. I think everything in one platform doesn’t really work. It doesn’t it doesn’t fit the needs of your company. But you also don’t want a spaghetti of integrations. And so finding that balance is quite hard because the HR professionals see the value of technology, they can get quite excited about a certain application, about a tool that they’ve seen at a conference.
And it’s trying to figure out, do we really need it? What are we trying to solve? What’s the process behind it? Do we have the right governance around it? And getting from the excitement around technology, which I think we need to get to what are we trying to solve? How do we get it implemented. Is it duplicating capabilities that we might have elsewhere?
It’s trying to have those type of conversations, which I think are probably the the most challenging.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. Do you think that’s become more challenging now with artificial intelligence in the end?
Kris Legroe
I think it, it, it does because my experience is that people focus on the technology I and I’d like to focus on what can we do with it, what are the use cases that we can apply? What are we trying to resolve by using technology as an enabler to get to a better result? And and it’s it’s, you know, dragging people back into that.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. And the lifecycle of the product, too. You know, understanding how long it takes to get that product in, what other products are, and how other products are evolving. I think HR needs a good partner who can share the enthusiasm but also understand that we’re going to bring in some technologies.
We’re going to have a set of standards about what they need to accomplish from a business perspective, but they also need to fit into the tech stack right? Because if they’re an outlier, they don’t work with other systems. You know, I think there are assumptions that might be being made by HR sometimes about the system. It looks great and it probably connects with everything else. And maybe it looks great and it doesn’t connect with everything else. Right. And that’s a hard lesson to learn once you put the system in and you get to the point where you can actually get the desired output from it.
You’ve put in a lot of systems over the last 15, 20 years. Is it getting easier?
Kris Legroe
I think it is getting easier. I find that most companies like yourselves are a lot more focused on customer success. I don’t it’s a role that existed, you know, a decade ago. No. Maybe not in that. In that sense, the fact that technology is evolving so rapidly, it’s pretty good because people see the difference, see the evolution. On the other side, it creates a challenge because, you know, you need to keep up every quarter. You need to have some, you know, good processes in place and good governance to make sure that you integrate these releases seamlessly.
But it’s also a challenge, in my opinion, if you see a new tool and you know that there’s a requirements gap in your current environment. You don’t know when, and it could be in one quarter, maybe in three quarters, maybe in 18 months, when your legacy system might have caught up with those requirements. And so by the time you’ve implemented something new, you could have had it, you could have had it already without any less effort.
So it’s also trying to figure out how that works is a bit of a challenge. But I think. I think it’s easier because people understand it a lot better. You know.
Dimitri Boylan
The technical savviness of the HR department.
Kris Legroe
And people understand that, you know, the future of HR is digital, that’s what we need to do. And therefore you see a lot of support, but also a lot of understanding about the complexity of implementing something like that. Right? I see that a lot more within my, you know, with my HR colleagues than, if I would compare it maybe ten, 12 years ago. So yeah, it has become it has become easier.
Dimitri Boylan
How do you think that compares to the technology people that you work with, that work with other businesses, like the relationship between tech and finance, the relationship between tech and sales as opposed to the relationship between tech and HR? Different do you think?
Kris Legroe
I have the impression this is my personal. Yeah, it’s my perception. Obviously. Probably finance, sales, and marketing, from a technology perspective, I would say they are a bit more mature than the HR space, which means that they are maybe a bit more conservative or they became a bit more conservative.
Whereas for us, like I like my example around, you know, guiding people in their career, which is something we couldn’t do before that created us sort of the sky’s the limit mentality. And people get really excited about, you know, what we can do for employees and driving employee experience and having a conversation like, you know, we have a clear strategy as a company. We figured out what the skills are that we need to achieve that strategy. And guess what? We’re going to help you to actually get those skills, to acquire those skills. That’s a really nice place to be. And we are not there yet. But having people see that it’s possible to get there right in the foreseeable future. And I think that creates a lot of, you know, excitement then. And yes, we can do that. Whereas I think maybe in other areas it’s a bit more, you know, this is maybe, maybe a legal framework. More on the finance side, for example. If you look at accounting or very much focused on processes, if you look at supply chain, it feels a bit more flexible in the HR space.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, I think I think the challenges are more discrete in an area like finance. And when you get into HR, helping people be more successful in their careers is not a business requirement for a system, right? It’s much more complex than that. And you have to translate that into strategies that have digital execution. Right. And that’s very, very different than looking at your general ledger and saying, well, we really should be able to see it in three places or, or, you know, we need to, close the books, you know, three days faster. I think in supply chain there might be some dynamics that are very changing because supply chain is really changing a lot structurally.
But in HR, I considered sort of structural changes. The way the company deals with its employee is structurally changing. Right. And so you mentioned before, you know, things like skills, for example, and you know, there you are developing technology for people and guiding HR. How detailed do you get into the actual execution of the HR strategy?
Kris Legroe
What I like to do with my team is, and it’s something a practice that I acquired when I went through some of the agile transformations in other companies, it’s, you know, you have your HR strategy, which is typically something that you want to achieve in 2 or 3 years’ time. Define the time scale, but it’s really a longer-term vision. And then I sort of force my team to break down those strategic pillars into annual objectives, making sure that, you know, how can we support those different strategic pillars and what is the annual initiative that we want to set up as a team to most likely, you know, digitally enable those strategic pillars? And then I also enforce them to break those annual initiatives even further down into quarterly deliverables.
And I think having that quarterly pace really helps me, because in a fast-moving environment like like ours, you know, having a three-year plan doesn’t make a lot of sense. Because you might have an acquisition or maybe something else that, you know, has a big impact on the organization, and you need to change your plan anyway.
So having that quarterly focus is something I try to establish in my team and the people I work with. But always having that strategic, line of sight, right? Always knowing, yeah, if I do this, it actually contributes to this annual initiative. Yeah. And that contributes to the strategic pillar of the HR strategy.
Dimitri Boylan
Do you have meetings with HR where you just go in and talk about the wishes, the ambitions, the ideas, the things that they’re thinking about without talking about the technology at all?
Kris Legroe
Yes, we have established those mainly with the centers of excellence within each of the rewards teams, the talent acquisition team, and learning and development. We try to capture their roadmap, ambitions, and issues that they’re rightly experiencing today and then try to integrate that into my planning session for the next quarter, or if we look at an annual, planning session for the next year.
You always have to manage expectations. And, to my earlier point, it’s always very sometimes you go too quickly into solutions and into technology. Whereas, we want to look into, you know, what’s the use case? What are we trying to resolve? How does the ideal situation look rather than, you know, how can we fix this? And we’d like to. What I’m planning now for next year is to do the same with the people partners and try to get their translation of what’s out there. Right. And what are the employees, the managers experiencing with the applications that they use? And how can we sort of integrate some of those improvements into our plan as well? But that’s a next step. I think, you know, with COEs, you typically have that relationship a lot easier than with HR generalists, just because of the nature of their role.
Dimitri Boylan
The reason I bring it up is because I think that sometimes when you come from the tech side and you talk to HR, it might always be that the conversation gets sort of hijacked by, well, we’re you know, we’re talking about the system, this system or this system or this system.
You know, we’re talking about the learning system. So suddenly it’s not really where you want to be with learning. It gets to be more about, well, what does this system not do? What could this is, you know, and so you don’t get like that whole vision thing. So you do work with them on just sort of like vision.
So, if you’re working with them on a vision, what they really want to accomplish, etc., do you also sometimes go in and just say to them, “You know, we took a look at what kind of we took a look at our learning system, and we think that it was built ten years ago. And we know that technology can do these things that our learning system doesn’t do anymore?”
Have you thought about how you might want to take advantage of that type of thing? Do you come in and do things like that?
Kris Legroe
I’ve done that in previous experiences. At VMO2 because we’ve just implemented everything, and we’re right—you know, we’re not at that level yet. But I think that’s where I and my team should be. My aspiration is that you become—you’re not the Oracle team or the Avature team. Right? You are digital consultants, and you have become specialists in how HR should transform digitally to be fit for the future, right? That’s really the role I want my team to play in this.
You know, we are the digital transformation specialist and we will help you to enable your business process this and try to tackle your, your, your problems, your challenges by the use of technology.
Dimitri Boylan
How are your HR partners feeling right now about artificial intelligence? Are they asking you to explain it from, you know, soup to nuts?
Kris Legroe
I think there is a certain level of excitement, given the fact that we’re in a telecom, which is part of the high-tech sector, I don’t see a lot of concerns about, you know, it’s going to take over my job, but they really see the opportunities. I think they sort of get the concepts.
Again, as I mentioned before, I always move it back to use cases. What can we do? Well, we had a conversation, for example, about learning experience. And, like you said, the focus was too much on the technology and not on what we really want to achieve. What are we trying to do? The main goal was we want hyper-personalized learning journeys, And then you get to a different and you can tell a different… I think you know skills will be the currency that you need to use to actually get there. And, and so you get into a different dynamic then.
Yeah, we need to implement the learning experience platform, right? That’s where it started. But you want to get away from that and really try to resolve, you know what? What are we trying to do here? What’s in it for the employees? What’s in it for the learning team? And how can we get there? What do we need to do?
Dimitri Boylan
And then you sort of back into the requirements that we might want to have for a system. Yes. And we then look at the systems we have and see whether they meet the requirements. And if they don’t, we go outside and see if other people meet the requirements. And the whole thing is really rooted in that original conversation about what the business really wanted to do.
It’s a nice pattern to have because if you get into it, you can use it over and over again.
Yeah. And it’s true that, you know, technology really is evolving very fast in AI is going to evolve very fast. And it’s, you know, the way we see it, I think, you know, you know, some technology, some systems out there are going to keep pace.
Some systems will probably fall behind. Yeah. And it’s hard to tell right now what the impact of falling behind is. But the early indication is that it really pays to keep up with what’s going on with AI, because some of that value is really, really, can be game-changing. Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s exciting.
And then, so, do you think when you talk about these strategies, your group, how do you tell your group to think about themselves? I mean, do you tell them to think about themselves as consultants, advisors and designers of digital experiences? Or how do you describe to your team what you guys do?
Kris Legroe
I like to start with the employee experience and the employee journey first. Okay. And then see how, you know, what is the experience today? How can we improve that, and how does that align with the people plan and strategy? Are there any products that are being developed? You know, like what I mentioned a personalized learning journey for.
And how do we match that experience and employee journey with the product, the people strategy, the people plan? And how do we enable that process and how do we implement that? So that’s for me it starts off of the conversation. And, you know, the whole concept of employee journeys is something I’m really interested in. And I think we’re not looking at that enough within their HR environment.
I think we can or we should find a lot of inspiration in what other domains like marketing have been doing around digital transformation and customer journeys, or how you see some consumer organizations developing digital customer service journeys, for example. And I, I’m convinced that you can apply those to your employee experience as well within our space.
You know how we deal with data, how we create employee personas. I think you can find a lot of inspiration within marketing. How you want to personalize the learning journey. How do you want to make sure that manager self-service is used a lot more? You can think about how can we create those employee journeys and how can we use some of the tactics that maybe a customer service or a consumer organization has been doing.
Dimitri Boylan
So your group is actually looking at those other things and coming back to HR.
Kris Legroe
I try to inspire them.
Dimitri Boylan
And saying, look what’s going on in customer experience. Look what’s going on in, in marketing, and how they’re dealing with, buyer experiences. Exactly. And so you’re really acting as a, as, as, as not just a technology advisor and provider, but as a strategic partner for them, which is a very that’s a strong. So that’s very interesting. Yeah. So it’ll be interesting to see how you move through your talent transformation. It sounds like you’re thinking about all the right things. So, you know, obviously coming in after a big merger, there’s a lot of work to do.
It’s been great having you here. I’d love to have you back sometime to talk about, how you’ve unearthed all of those, use cases around the main systems that you put in, because I think that there’s a lot of work to be done there, but there’s also a lot of, emotional wins there. Love to have you back. It’s been a pleasure.
Kris Legroe
Thanks for having me.
Dimitri Boylan
Thank you so much.
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